Push Pull Marketing for Sales w/guest Nick Loise

Welcome to the oil and gas sales and marketing podcast where every week your hosts Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey welcome back everybody and Matt we did not get a review lately so come on audience leave us. All those conferences and no one left us a review but everybody's coming up to the booth. Yeah coming up to talk to us and today

we have a guest it's actually Nick. Is it Louise? Welcome to the show. I kind of want to jump right into it because we're having fantastic conversations before I hit record and the whole subject of this episode is going to be called push and pull and I made you stop so that we can start recording this. Let's kind of get into what that means to you and how does that affect sales and marketing in 2024. First off thanks for having me on. What you guys are doing is great. Great

dynamic between the two of you guys I press shows so I'm really excited on being here and everything you guys are doing for the oil and gas industry is top shelf so thanks for doing that and guys give them some reviews show them some love. I mean it's horrible that they don't have any but I push pull if you think about it from a classic marketing perspective there's push marketing and there's pull marketing. If you think about it inside organizations there's a push

pull between sales and marketing and I think it's been the highest performing sales organizations are breaking down that push and pull. Marketing is producing leads sales are saying the leads aren't any good and vice versa and for so on and it's a terrible conversation to be having and as a leader in charge of revenue or just as a P&L holder you don't want to be having that dynamic of push pull and so what I think the most important thing that has to

happen today is you got to get everybody on the same side of the table. I love your philosophies of everybody should be compensated at the same side and really should certain depositions be in certain geographical areas or should they reside in both departments and so that's the most important thing that people can be doing today if they really want to accelerate their sales cycle and we could talk a little bit about that too. Yeah so let's go ahead and go down that

rabbit hole let's talk about what has changed and why things like your inside sales people need to be as connected to marketing as they are to sales. Yeah so we were talking a little bit about this and I'm passionate about this and there's a lot of people talking and the folks that are talking are kind of on the cutting edge of let's call it sales information there's a lot of really bad sales information out there by people that maybe have sold in their nightmares

right haven't made a call in like 50 years learn something and they're kind of regurgitating it or they bought somebody else's course and they're trying to sell it as their own I'll stay away from that for this we're gonna keep this PG-13 on this show but really what's going on out there is if you think about the SDR position and there's a lot of conversations about are they valuable is there a high expense what should happen if you go back to Aaron

Ross in Predictable Revenue he was the first one to kind of talk about that model of sending out the email and having somebody set up meetings really today the SDR probably should be sitting in marketing it's really a biz development job it's not a sales development job where I'm putting meetings on people's calendars that could be a byproduct but really they are marketing intelligence if you use a military terminology they're your

boots on the ground they're making phone calls they're figuring out what's going on they're probably doing a much better job of looking at LinkedIn see your movements are going to see what's happening on with different industries and so if you're using LinkedIn LinkedIn Navigator Palo whatever product you're using and not having certain flashes for your SDR or for your account executives are missing the point on that but secondly the SDR really should be

gathering marketing intelligence sure booking meetings are a byproduct of that but really figuring out what's going on in the marketplace and really where the pivot points and pressure points are within the organization and we talked a little bit about that of how long sales cycles are happening today right and they're getting elongated so how can we accelerate that and how do we use marketing and sales better for that we can talk about that a little bit later

too if you guys want. Yeah I love where you're going this this fits in right to Matt and I's philosophy in that sales has changed and what worked for sales people years ago doesn't work anymore and the way that sales leader coach and train their sales team needs to change for that as well and marketing I believe is something that I think all salespeople should at least understand if not actually participate a little bit and I think marketing people definitely

need to be in the heads of sales people so they can get the information that makes their job better because the information the salesmen have comes directly from the customers and a lot of times marketing is disconnected from the customers and your point is exactly right that SDR is that pivot point the boots on the ground that sits in between sales and marketing that is getting that information from the customer's mouth and it's vital that all that stuff

is shared in a way that makes sense I love how you're thinking about that. Well Mark one of the things that I just wanted to add in here from a marketing perspective and Nick love to get your take on this but I really think marketing's job is to make sales easier for the salespeople to help map online the digital sales customer journey to the point that the salespeople are just kind of filling in the gaps so like if the heavy lifting is done by the marketing machine

it can help move them down the field faster and then speed up the sales cycle and the better you can get marketing involved in that to map what's going on it just makes the salesperson's job easier. Hey Nick can you see why the salespeople that listen I should love Matt. You got to smile from ear to ear on my face right and listen I'm not as bright as most marketers I'm just a dumb sales guy out of school playing sports they

taught you to follow a playbook so in sales I just followed a playbook they said make calls I made calls I didn't know any better you marketing people are a lot smarter you know that but the other thing too that Matt you're so spot on with that is not only to speed up the sale but also when things kind of get elongated because we are kind of in a little bit of a vacuum of trust deals are slowing up people just don't know what's going on as we're closer to

November that's going to get confused a little bit more no political statement on that it's just the nature of every evolution of a election but what you now need is marketing because now you have people that are in the pipeline that need to be nurtured that need to be talked to that need to be communicated with the salesperson is going to do that but not as well as you can automate it not as well as you can do with great tools out there and not as well as you

can with the marketing side the other thing too that we teach and that I try to get my clients to do and I'm sure you guys preach this is not all profiles need to be communicated with the same and that's where marketing I think it do a better job you could figure out what the objections are and have different marketing funnels for the objections right so if it's a price objection or a price nurture that has to happen then your marketing funnel has

to go down that platform versus one where I'm looking at other competitors versus one which saying is I don't know if this fits into my priority or whatever it is and I think you go back to where we started the conversation with the SDRs the SDR is the boot on the ground and they'll kind of hear what's going on and their talk tracks will be a heck of a lot better than marketing's talk tracks unless marketing is listening to their calls running them

through some AI scraper right or something of that nature to see consistently what are they hearing from customers or prospects but also what are they saying and how do we mirror that and now how do we have our marketing messages mirror that realizing that you're going to have to be adjusting your marketing messages over the course of time has the dynamics of the marketplace change so Nick like retargeting remarketing the concept of that if you

can get your SDRs to drive them to specific pages you can build drip campaigns with digital ads to kind of bump them where it's indirect where I love automated messages because it's not like you're in your face like hey let's have a call what's going on it's just like your top of mind it's the pens in the pads if you drive them into the right funnel online if you have those campaigns built out of those target personas as with you can drop them the

messages that they need to be hearing to move them along to get them to take action and then if you have it tied into your CRM as soon as they take the next step you can put them on a new drip or you can take them off that and you can manage your dollars a lot more effectively and messaging you're speaking a phenomenal language right so if you think about direct response tradition of direct response marketers where I was trained

like all his books I love Dan right I got to work with them right and trust me every day wasn't sunshine and roses but I learned so much that it was worth it right and the guy is just a genius on that and it's really just going deep on your funnels and really listen salespeople are lazy and marketers are lazy and we want to create one funnel and drive everybody through that and just want the credit

card to happen or the sale to happen I realized that I want that too as a business owner for all my customers I want all closes to be one call closes I want only one funnel which is one step maybe three steps at the most but that just doesn't happen today you just need to nurture people and work it through but you said something really spot on is the copy the copy needs to talk to the pain the copy needs to talk to the problem agitate solve so what's going on

how can we agitate that to make it really really get under their skin and then how do we solve it if our solution solves it for them but all problems are different and all pain is different based on the persona and it'll all start really how you tag them how you do your discovery how either the SDR or the account executive figure that out and now you can start running that through yeah Matt and I've talked about it's a bunch in that no matter what your product

is solution what problem it solves that conversation is different depending on who you're talking into in the prospect organization if you're talking to the executive team of a public company you might be talking about shareholder value if you're talking about a guy that's running a business you might be talking about having projects completed on time and on budget even if what you're selling is an extension cord the problem that solve is different where

you are in the hierarchy and I love the fact of automating some of these conversations because to your point Nick I'm not gonna say I'm a lazy sales person I will say that I appreciate leads coming into me that I didn't have to spend three hours hustling for right and especially if those leads are high quality it makes my life easier and it makes my company's bottom line better so it's kind of a win-win for everybody I would love to make sure we cover the

topic of I don't know what it's called now but Dan Kennedy called it attraction marketing content marketing and account based selling and the reality is mark that's what I live and breathe every day now is everything's in bound we had a four billion dollar company call us the other day I mean these are steps that outbound sales teams would salivate over and you can position yourself as an expert as an authority as a trusted advisor online and draw these

people to you as then Kenny again attraction marketing Nick I love to hear kind of some more of your views on that I guess first off LinkedIn is a great platform for that but there's other things you can be tuned I think if you're a marketer today and you're not trying to harvest the power of YouTube and using case studies and using information and information marketing vis-a-vis videos and on YouTube as one of the platforms you are just missing

the boat the organization at is itself or somebody in the organization should have a book published there should be various things because not only it's the best channels that people are searching on YouTube is the second or third largest search engine Amazon is the second or third largest search engine LinkedIn is where most of our B2B searches happen so you need to be on there with your info marketing right here I think now he's calling it info

first marketing right so it's the information and the searching for the information and people consume information different ways I'm a reader but I may be a video watcher if I'm on YouTube looking for how to videos for a project I'm also gonna maybe look for a business problem let's look to see what's out there or audible or audio so you have to use all those things like a podcast and things of that nature I'm a firm believer that you need to do that

it takes time and I also think that it takes some intestinal fortitude and sometimes people just don't have the patience and won't nurture it along the way to really get to where it is but also there's a lot of bad bad bad content out there a lot of content being regurgitated you right Matt there are really bad podcast not like this one that really provide no value there's a lot of people just posting the same old same old on LinkedIn you got to have

really good content well understanding how the algorithm works and especially on YouTube in the search engines also how LinkedIn works and I think it's only like 5% of people are actually even publishing on LinkedIn original content right out of even everybody on the whole platform these algorithms are getting really good and really good quality content that's tagged correctly sending the right signals rises to the top and most people don't go past the first two

or three whatever okay on whatever it is it's really about making high quality content and if everybody else is making crap content it's actually easy to beat if you actually put in the work to do it right and you put something out there of value or you add to the national conversation I like to look at it as like everything that's kind of top ranking is what is the standardized best way to present something and if you can add to that conversation or you can provide

a different opinion on that it's called query by diversity and it will force that up there you can get visibility pretty quick yeah you can't regurgitate content like you have to put out something of original thought that shows your expertise but the algorithms can find it and move it up it's incredible how well good content will find the right listener especially even like on tiktok okay because tiktok shows it to more people not just to your own

audience and there's a lot of these different platforms that from a multi-campaign standpoint you could start hitting people from all these different angles and create this omnipresence around your target customer yeah and Matt I want to warn the audience here do not use what Matt says as far as quality content as an excuse thinking that in order for you to post video on LinkedIn you need professional cameras and editing like absolutely yeah

shoot really good content on your iPhone just make sure your audio quality is good most people prefer that kind of consumer based video the biggest thing is are you telling an interesting story that's valuable people that aren't posting videos on LinkedIn don't use that as an excuse you don't need three cameras and a switching board and everything else you could do everything fine just on your iPhone but put it out there the other thing is it's weird I see

a lot of really good sales people in our industry right now in oil and gas that are actually looking for new positions if you're looking for new position and this is a personal motivator for you to post content on LinkedIn let me tell you where the hiring manager is gonna go first it'll go to LinkedIn even if you painted in a resume they're gonna go to LinkedIn and let me tell you something if you're one of ten possible hires and you have a lot of quality content that

you've done yourself on LinkedIn and none of your competitors do let me guess who the hiring manager is going to lean towards so it's not just the way to show yourself as an expert help promote your company your products and be that thought leader it actually helps you personally so audience there's no excuse for you not putting content on your personal LinkedIn page none the important thing though is really doing it as Matt said and also just being original like

I said use your phone we have the equivalent of what they used in the 80s if I think about my beta max video recorder we have so much better quality now that we could do and if you think about Dan Kennedy who we were talking about a little bit one of his core mantras in marketing is never be boring and it's from David Oakley if you think about the mad men that you got in the back you can never bore your customer to buying your product and services you

gotta do original things to break through the clutter but you're really hitting the pain points and having the right communication methodology whatever that is and the right content out there really accelerates the sales process and it goes back to one of the conversations we're having is just it things are taking longer and marketing and sales people are lazy and they don't keep on pushing that sale forward over and over and over and over again so you as the

business owner you as the product line leader you as the CRO or the general manager have to figure out how do I bring marketing and sales together and use technology to move things through because if I have people that have to do it people will break down every time I want systems and processes to work in my marketing in my sales so I could get things going. Nick I would love to talk more about your system and processes I want to add

just one quote because we're getting into my area I love talking about some of this stuff I can't remember exactly who said this quote maybe you can reference into somebody it talks a lot about like branding and Super Bowl ads and stuff like that is people watch what's interesting they watch what they're interested in and sometimes those could be ads right like the thing is like disruption marketing everybody hates it my kids hate it like they don't know

anything about advertising but product placement and like the Super Bowl is a bunch of eyeballs to create a shared experience and then at the same time they actually put effort into their marketing that I watch the Super Bowl for the advertising I mean it is my industry but still I think a lot of people watch the ads if everybody put that level of effort in their advertising they would have so much better sales it's like we're only going to do really good on

advertising and telegrade story on Super Bowl why is that I think that that extra level of effort because also people do business with people they know I can trust they want to connect they want to know you're human back in the day when I was going door-to-door sales okay I was pharma but essentially I had a business card of my company and then I actually had a company or another card that was my blog my personal blog okay and I mean this is like my space and

Facebook's very new but I was trying to connect with people to let them see that there was another side of me besides just the logo that I was carrying doesn't make sense and trying to humanize that that barriers being broken down even more and people want so much more human connection after COVID it would be so much better like right if we were all sitting in a room together then how we're doing it today how do you reach through the computer and connect with

somebody and build that personal connection why do you think the most popular shows today are reality TV shows because they want to see what's going on with people they want to see behind the scenes and I'll tell you there's been billion-dollar businesses built on iPhones okay I agree with you Mark there's no excuse for not being able to create content with your phone and also videos harder but guess what where it's hard there's opportunity I would just

encourage everybody to one you have to have good content whatever that is but then to Nick's point I would like to hear him talk more about it is system and processes make you a super human salesperson it gives every person the same experience or more of the same experience so you can give everybody that quality customer journey yeah Nick I will put you on a spot just a little bit I'm gonna bring you back to your sales expertise can you talk about how

you would put together system and processes for a company to bring them up to speed and make them more efficient now in 2024 because one of things in oil and gas is we tend to be 10 years behind everybody else as far as tools and processes so we have a lot of sales and marketing leaders and I bet they'd love to hear your take on what you would just slap together if you had a chance the first thing we do is bring everybody together marketing and sales

whoever is talking to the customer or is hearing from the customer I really want the people hearing from the customer equally as much so get them all around the room we're gonna put in the old days we would put butcher block paper all over the walls remember right and now we would just take the steps that we do a front of the funnel right top of the funnel tow food to get people in but also while we're moving people through then we would do it for every ICP or

avatar whatever Freezy LG would want to use of just saying okay what's going on and how are we touching them and there's all these different color sticky notes it's old school I know but oil and gas guys will love it so blue is there's a LinkedIn outreach yellow is I'm doing a voicemail drop emails whatever you're doing and so now I'm mapping out the funnel and I'm mapping out all the touches and I'm looking for where are things breaking and where am I elongating

and where can I accelerate the sales process goes back to systems and processes so I'm looking to say what can I automate how do I put tasks in place that sales people know what to do how do I create a content category a content library information library to be used for all different avatars for all different objections because once again we always get lazy so we don't go deep on all the different objections and I now need to have a funnel as we talked

about earlier for my price I have to have a funnel for my it's not in my budget I have a funnel for we're using somebody else and I'm moving all that stuff through and then we take it then we take everybody up for dinner get some good wine in them put them in Chicago's we're gonna get a mistake the next day we're gonna go back in as they thought about it and marinated and now we're gonna look where can we overlay and where can we put different systems and

processes it in and now the hard part comes because you have to give one person usually the general manager or the product line manager of the CRO they have to start automating and putting this in and now you have it so now you have your talk tracks now you have your objection matrixes now you have all your automation now you have your LinkedIn strategy now you have your YouTube strategy it's all going out if I'm using trade shows I have my pre and

of my post trade shows I have my geo fencing strategy when I'm doing trade shows whatever you're doing you're using all the different tools in the toolboxes and everything is maximizing it and you're pushing everything to how do I accelerate the sale how do I accelerate the sale so that's what we would do some of the stuff we want to get some quick wins if that's one of the questions you may be asking is we're looking at what's sitting in the pipe

line what's languishing in the pipeline and how can we move that through how can we accelerate that through how do we put I called the Blitzkrieg obviously we're filming this today and it's the anniversary of D-Day right so how do I put all my effort on moving things that are stuck in the pipeline to the close I love this that's two strategies audience even though we had a lot of conversations about marketing Nick's expertise is really around sales sales

teams coaching sales audits name is company sales performance team dot com we'll have a link in the show notes if you have a need for some help I'm telling you right now reach out to Nick he is not going to try to sell you something he's gonna figure out very quickly if he can help you or not and he will tell you if he can't help you unfortunately fellows we're getting close to having a wind down the show I could have stayed on here for another hour a little house

keeping stuff to do need to sign up for our two newsletters we have our only gas events newsletter if you want to be informed of all the gas trade shows expose conferences we put them in the inbox once a month never spam you and then our Sunday update is literally killing it Nick and I give you a good example of when a sales leader is wrong my marketing brought me his idea to do another newsletter at the end of last year and I knew they would fail so I'd

let them do it so they could fail and I was wrong we went from zero 20,000 subscribers in one month now it's we're pushing 70,000 subscribers it's fun little newsletter the name newsletter is not even in it comes out once a week on Sundays there's recipes in the wall filled backstories of ogg and we help house animals are looking for their forever home insider trading on the commodities is really cool so the link in that is in the show notes as well once

again it's free we never charge you for that and then Matt and I social channel links are also in the show notes if you want to connect with us on social Matt and I are insiders group still coming strong Matt I had two other people reach out to me what to join our insiders group so now we have to get ready to go you all need to go check out Nick's website salesperformanceteam.com I want to go through step by step all your services Nick I wish we really had time for that

we're gonna have to have you back maybe I can have you on my marketing podcast best SEO podcast but essentially I would love to get your feedback on the modules that we're doing for this insiders group as well mark the sites ready to go I'm ready when you are buddy let's get it going you know what Matt we should get Nick's views on that maybe you can turn it to an episode so it's like a real working episode and Nick if we're doing something wrong tell

us we're wrong and our audience will share their and our learning experience that's actually a really good idea so I think we should do that love it Nick was saying with the funnel okay and what he's doing with the sales process as he was saying that I was imagining in my head how the marketing funnel and how it's tied to CRM when you're doing like e-commerce sales Nick gets it he is the bridge I would encourage anybody if you're struggling to kind of merge the

two categories Nick gets it and I would I would reach out to him he can help you bridge the gap he can speak both languages he understands it Nick thanks it was nice meeting him I really enjoy the conversation we're not out of here yet Matt Nick this is the segment where we had the LinkedIn fail or tip that's right yeah do you have a fail or tip for our audience we guys probably have a ton of fails I won't go with that there's a lot of bad stuff out there we

kind of hit a couple of those things of really bad content posting old content posting non-original content I think if you're not using voice messages on LinkedIn especially in your outreach or part of your funnel you're missing a golden opportunity if you're not linking in some level hey I just had a quick video so okay if I could send it over to you you're missing it and it goes back to people want to know like and trust you well the best way to do that is your

voice I have a face for radio so I try to use my voice as much as possible you got to do those two type of things if you're not using and attempting to use chat GPT to get your searches better to get your queries better on doing your outreach you're missing the boat immensely and also on your LinkedIn navigator if you're not using abolium searches and chat GPT to really ideal customer profile ICP we kind of called it by a number of different names throughout

the course of this podcast if you're not really tighten that in and figuring out what their pain points are and what their messaging is but going deep because I think what we do in math we are surface on the pain on the messaging you really got to go through and understand and the other thing that we talked about is figuring out not only what does the person at the first level buying but what is their boss wanting to hear and what is their boss's boss wanting to

hear and figuring out all those messages and sending it out to people as we talked about don't be lazy in your marketing don't be lazy in your LinkedIn and stop posting old stuff people I have not used voice on LinkedIn myself and I will now use it that is a great tip I've never even thought about that for you for all that was awesome Nick we absolutely have to get you back on this is like we scratch the surface audience we got to get out here Nick's contact

information both his LinkedIn profile his website or in the show notes go check him out reach out to if you need some help alright guys Nick this was great Matt I know you got a run in a minute so thank both y'all for joining us remember people make a difference and not a sale thanks for listening to OG GM the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry if you like this show leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn

about all our other shows don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter this show has been a production of the oil and gas global network